Each one of these websites have EXCELLENT affiliate programs if you want something other than Amazon.

I personally still like to link to Amazon but many people in this niche like to link to those websites.

I use them for keyword research, however.

If you look at rei.com you'll many different categories. Let's say you want to do camp, hike and climb.

Just click on those categories and start writing best of lists based on the different categories.

You'll see best backpack tents, best hiking boots, best bivy sacks, best camp kitchens and on and on and on.

You'll want to do this with all the websites above. Just scour them and find keywords. You'll also want to do this on Amazon too. Just go to their website and go to the outdoors section. You'll get plenty of ideas there.

Don't be afraid to write low competition best of's too (as long as they're low competition). I find if JAAXY says a post gets between 80 to 150 traffic a month, you'll likely get over 1000 clicks per month.

Don't be afraid of experimenting with keywords. 2 years ago I was deciding whether to write a post based on a keyword that I thought no one would purchase. I thought the products were way to expensive.

You know what happened? That post got around $500 to $1000 PER MONTH for me. One keyword. I just got finished making a whole website around this niche and it's already doing pretty well.

Here's a few examples of these types of websites in the outdoor niche:

There's a bunch of different niches you can do this in. In 2016, I got a website over $2,000 in a month in 7 months using this strategy and in 2017 I got a website over 5k a month using this strategy. This year my site is probably going to be over 2k at the 6th month mark using this strategy (I'll talk more later about this site later).

2) Mixture of best of's and reviews

This is another method that works well and If you're going this route I would be more specific with your niche and choose a niche where at least one best of list can bring in over 30,000 clicks a month. Obviously this is going to be a pretty competitive keyword but it's worth it if you can get it to page one.

An example of this would be a website where you focus one of the following keywords:

Best coffee maker

best electric shaver

best wireless router

best fitness tracker

best drones

Something like that. I know JAAXY says a keyword like "best electric shavers" only gets 880 clicks a month but it's WAY over that.

I know for a fact because I know a website that ranked 1st for that keyword in the past and it brought in 32,000 clicks a month. This same websites ranked 1st for best wireless routers as well and that keyword brought in over 100,000 clicks a month alone.

That website only had 10 posts and generated $40,000 in November and $80,000 in December alone. The majority of the traffic came from best electric shavers, best wireless routers and best 3d pens. The site was completely monetized through Amazon except the 3d pens article which was monetized through a separate affiliate program.

This site is nicheless but if you're targeting a keyword like the ones above, I wouldn't be nicheless anymore. You'll want to build an authority site.

Say you want to make a coffee maker website. Spend like 2 weeks writing the absolute best coffee maker guide you can. Make it 15,000 words and make it look really good. You may even want to take a course on Wordpress code so you can make it look special.

The rest of your time you'll want to write individual coffee maker reviews and coffee blog posts and interlinking them.

Most of your clicks and profit will come from the best coffee maker post (you might want to make a best espresso machine post, best keurig machine post and so on too) but most your time will go towards writing reviews and blog posts to build authority.

This isn't an easy keyword to rank for because the competition is tough but I think with dedicated effort you can do it.

This website writes best of lists for pool products but the main focus is on robotic vacuum cleaners for your pool. This is by far the longest post on this website and the creator of this site wrote plenty of individual reviews for robot vacuum cleaners too (there's not many other reviews outside of this keyword on the site,

This site does pretty well and generates around 100,000 clicks a month. They rank first for best robotic pool cleaners in google and with the 8% commission rate you get for pool products on Amazon, I'm guessing this website does well.

3) YouTube (the future of traffic in my opinion)

I'll go over my problems with Google when going over my progress with my new site in the next section but I believe YouTube is where people need to start turning their attention, at least part of the time.

YouTube is already the second most trafficked search engine in America and I believe one day it can take over Google (owned by the same company). At the very least more YouTube videos will start showing up in Google (most best of lists already have YouTube videos on page 1).

I experimented with some YouTube videos in the last few moths and I''m VERY satisfied with the results.

I created one video in October (it's a winter keyword) and in November, this video has earned me over $200 already.

This video will probably make me close to $1000 this winter and it only took me 1 day to make!

The clicks is what really has me excited. This video got 5500 clicks in November and drove 2800 clicks to Amazon. So 50% of the traffic goes to Amazon. My content in Google gets about 32% to Amazon.

And just so everyone knows, I have ZERO videos skills. I literally screen record a PowerPoint type presentation and read off a script about the products. My face is not in these videos and they have no special effects.

The reception is generally pretty good and the video has 32 likes and 4 dislikes. So people don't mind the simplicity and lack of special effects.

Here's a couple of posts I wrote that goes over more in depth about YouTube:

Alright, now on to the site I've been working on. The good news is it looks like I'll break $1500 to around 2k this month. I bought the domain for this site around April 1st and started writing on May 17th for it.

The bad news is Google.

Google is becoming so erratic and so hard to predict - it's becoming very frustrating . I have keywords bouncing all over the place. More difficult keywords I'm on page 1, others that I should easily be ranking for on page 1 are on page 5. Keywords aren't showing up. In some cases I'll write two completely different keywords and one keyword ends up ranking for both keywords. This is probably the case for 30% of the keywords on my site.

You can still make a profitable website with Google and I'm still making websites (for now) that target organic traffic with Google.

I just personally think Google has peaked, much like Facebook. To me they've started catering to corporate interests too much and you see the same websites in certain niches dominate all the keywords.

For example, when I was talking about "best coffee makers" up top I thought I was going to see a much more diverse search results - I know for certain it was much more diverse 2 years ago.

So who ranks for that term now?

Consumer reports

CNET

Thewirecutter

Good House Keeping

Digital Trends

USA Today

NYmag

Business Insider

There's only TWO niche websites ranking for that term, which is sad to me.

Type in Best drones 2018 and you'll see the same thing - corporate tech websites.

This isn't the case with all niches but for some it is. And I think you'll see this more and more. Google will reward a corporate website like Consumer Reports or CNET or Business Insider more than they'll reward a niche site. Even if the the niche site is a good one.

As of now keywords like best car alarms are almost entirely dominated by niche sites. But will it be like this in 2 years? If CNET and Wirecutter and USA Today decide to write that article (even though they really aren't authorities for that keyword) do you think they'll rank? Or smaller sites?

These are questions you have to ask yourself.

But it isn't all doom and gloom.

There's still plenty of niches that can work for Google (for now). And my opinion about Google isn't an indictment about the internet. There's a million ways to make money online.

I personally think YouTube is the best and the immediate future. The competition is so much smaller on YouTube and videos get results faster. Plus video content is easier to consume than written.

YouTube seems to be shifting to corporate interests as well but this is more in the entertainment and news markets. Best of's and individual reviews are still wide open to target. I'm sure one day it'll be dominated by larger corporations but that's years away and I'm sure the next traffic generating opportunity will be available by then.

So here's my main advice for 2019:

Pick a strategy and DON'T RELY SOLEY ON GOOGLE FOR TRAFFIC.

I know Pintrest is working for a lot of people too.

So if you were to be making a new website I would target keywords on Google, make simple YouTube videos and get into Pintrest. Don't put all your faith in to Google.

Hi Dylan, great post, lots of extremely useful information. Have to agree with you on your Google vs YouTube comments, simply because the move to web consumption on mobile makes YouTube easily the best one to consume there. Should we be adding sub titles to our videos? Thanks for taking the time to do this for us, Hudson.

Supreme info Dylan! Wow. Yeah I agree on YouTube and I have a hunch Pinterest is working for me harder than I realised after I got some unexpected sales recently.

Too bad about Google, but it's like you said, we can just pivot to another platform at the drop of a hat. Pretty great being a nimble independant like that.

Some indie YouTubers I follow are dropping names of future platforms such as Minds, Bitchute & Gab... if I forgot any others I'll add them later.

Anyway I was reminded of a video for new starters on YouTube by a guy called Styxhexenhammer666, he made this 2 years ago when he was on ~100K subs and he's now up to ~350K, and it's particularly relevent because he really, really hammers home the low entry point.

So, Styx's routine as a YouTuber is to record a short video of ~10-15 minutes, and just upload it straight. No editing, no nothing. Just taking a look at a recent video from today, it has 90K views. Literally a guy with a laptop and a webcam. Nothing fancy at all.

He's simply been consistent and built an audience over time for the particular niches he's interested in - current affairs, occult literature, and gardening. He also edits and sells obscure works that have fallen out of print from his blog.

His message is much the same as others: anyone can do this, it's low cost, the barriers are low. It's mainly about putting in the effort.

Very, very informative Dylan. Thank you. In particular, you recent experience with Google has me thinking.

I too have noticed those corporate websites ranking in top spots. Due to the obscene number of ads on most of them, I find myself clicking to the second or maybe even third page of Google more frequently.

Google can be a huge pain in the you know what!
I wrote a post recently where my website literally died - flatlined!!
But it has picked up again so that is good.
I know now not to rely solely on Google so thanks for all your tips here Dylan, truly appreciate it!

As you know I have gone down the, "best of", path after you gave that information earlier. I have had reasonable results making some money along the way.

I had a few issues with the website and plugins which held me up a bit but we are back on track for now. Looking forward to a decent holiday period and further to 2019 when hopefully all the hard work I have done till now will generate more income.

I have adopted the Pinterest model and so far about half my traffic comes from there so for all those out there trying to get posts indexed get on the platform as you can put that post infront of people without needing the big G.

Just need to get my head around youtube and we will see where that takes us.

Very interesting post Dylan, full of great content. I agree with the part about YouTube, to my mind its just a no brainer to have that as part of your marketing strategy, given how much traffic is uploaded to it every SECOND

Videos also help in the ranking of blogs and such like,

I agree with you about Pinterest as well and as I write am waiting for my PC to clean up a bit to do a training video on getting social media traffic

Outstanding post! I’ll have to read the other posts you’ve referenced. I personally made sites this before and did find a lot of success using a similar strategy. One was eating babysitter services and one was renting video game services. Both generated between $100 to $300 monthly.

I also noticed that my sites were all over the place and some months, I didn’t rank at all and relied on traffic from ppc as social media.

I plan on really focusing on YouTube and social media to get brand awareness!

I looked at some of the sites you mention including the Switchback Travel site and looked at their best of downhill ski post. There are 2 paragraphs of text for every link and dozens of links on the page. Can you remind me what you have found for the ratio of text to links? I thought that would be too many links for the amount of text.

Thanks Dylan,
I have been here for 2 months I am seek other avenues for traffic I just join Pinterest and signed up for Tailwind as well, other social medias Facebook, Twitter, Google + and submitted my website to some SEO/Directories, so thanks I am looking to go YouTube next don't have any experience, but I can do it.
Thanks Again keep up the good work, looking forward to more up dates I had to book mark your information because I will be reading it again soon:)
Cynthia,
Cheers!